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Walter J Whitman
Walt Whitman, 1887Walt Whitman, 1887
Born(1819-05-31)May 31, 1819
West Hills, Town of Huntington, Long Island, New York
DiedMarch 26, 1892(1892-03-26) (aged 72)
Camden, New Jersey
Occupationjournalist, editor, poet, teacher, civil servant for U.S. Department of the Interior, volunteer nurse

Walter Whitman (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist, journalist, and humanist. He was a part of the transition between Transcendentalism and Realism, incorporating both views in his works. His works have been translated into more than twenty-five languages. Whitman is among the most influential and controversial poets in the American canon. His work has been described as a "rude shock" and "the most audacious and debatable contribution yet made to American literature." As Whitman wrote in Leaves of Grass (By Blue Ontario's Shore), "Rhymes and rhymers pass away...America justifies itself, give it time..."

Life and work

Early life

Walter Whitman was born May 31, 1819 in West Hills, Town of Huntington, Long Island, to parents of Quaker background, Walter and Louisa Van Velsor Whitman. He was the second of nine children and immediately nicknamed "Walt" to distinguish him from his father. One of his siblings, born prior to him, did not make it past infancy. His mother was barely literate and of Dutch descent and his father was a Quaker carpenter. In 1823 the family moved to Brooklyn, where for six years Whitman attended public schools. His mother taught him the value of family ties, and Whitman remained devoted to his family throughout his life, becoming, in a real sense, its leader after the death of his father. Whitman inherited the liberal intellectual and political attitudes of a free thinker from his father, who exposed him to the ideas and writings of the socialists Frances Wright and Robert Dale Owen, the liberal Quaker Elias Hicks, and the deist Count Volney.

One advantage of living in Brooklyn was that Whitman saw many of the famous people of the day when they visited nearby New York City. Thus he saw President Andrew Jackson and Marquis de Lafayette. In what was one of Whitman's favorite childhood stories Marquis de Lafayette visited Brooklyn and, selecting the six-year-old Walt from the crowd, lifted him up and carried him. Whitman came to view this event as a kind of laying on of hands: the French hero of the American Revolution anointing the future poet of democracy in the energetic city of immigrants where the nation was being invented day by day.

At age eleven Whitman concluded his formal schooling. He worked as an office boy for lawyers and a doctor, then in the summer of 1831 became a printer's devil for the Long Island Patriot, a four-page weekly whose editor, Samuel L. Clements (not to be confused with Samuel L. Clemens/Mark Twain), shared the liberal political views of his father. It was here that Whitman first broke into print with "sentimental" bits of filler material. The following summer Whitman went to work for another printer, Erastus Worthington, and in the autumn he moved on to the shop of Alden Spooner, the most successful publisher-printer in Brooklyn. Although his family moved back to the area of West Hills in 1834, where another son, Thomas Jefferson, was born in July, Whitman stayed on in Brooklyn. He published a few pieces in the New York Mirror, attended the Bowery Theater, continued subscribing to a circulating library, and joined a local debating society. In his sixteenth year, Whitman moved to New York City to seek work as a compositor. However, a wave of Irish immigrants had contributed to the already unruly behavior in New York City's streets; anti-abolitionist and anti-Irish riots often broke out, unemployment was high, and the winter was miserably cold. Whitman could not find satisfactory employment and, in May 1836, he rejoined his family, now living in Hempstead, Long Island. Whitman taught at various schools until the spring of 1838 when he went to Huntington to found his own newspaper, the Long-Islander. For his publication, Whitman served as publisher, editor, pressman, and distributor - including home delivery. After ten months, he sold the publication to E. O. Crowell, whose first issue appeared on July 12, 1839.

Publishing

Whitman's stint as an independent newspaperman lasted until May 1839, when he sold the paper and his equipment and left town again. This time he was more fortunate, landing a job in Jamaica with James J. Brenton, editor of the Long Island Democrat. In 1841 he moved to New York City, working initially as a printer but ultimately as a journalist. His first important post was as editor of the New York Aurora in 1842. Throughout the 1840s he worked for more than a dozen city newspapers, including the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, where he was editor between 1846 and 1848. His position at the Eagle was abruptly terminated in part because of his disagreement with the newspaper's owners over the wisdom of the Wilmot Proviso, which stated that all territories had to be admitted into the Union as free soil states. The fact that he started a free soil paper in 1849 reinforces the conclusion that Whitman left his Brooklyn post partly for political reasons.

Leaves of Grass

Walt Whitman, age 37, frontispiece to Leaves of Grass, Fulton St., Brooklyn, N.Y., steel engraving by Samuel Hollyer from a lost daguerreotype by Gabriel Harrison.
Main article: Leaves of Grass

Whitman essentially spent the bulk of his life writing only one book, Leaves of Grass, which he continued to edit and revise until his death. Whitman intended to write a distinctly American epic.

The first versions of Leaves of Grass were self-published and poorly received. Several poems featured graphic depictions of the human body, enumerated in Whitman's innovative "cataloguing" style, which contrasted with the reserved Victorian ethic of the period. Despite its revolutionary content and structure, subsequent editions of the book evoked critical indifference in the US literary establishment. Outside the US, the book was a world-wide sensation, especially in France, where Whitman's intense humanism influenced the naturalist revolution in French letters. In 2000, the value of a copy of the first edition, which had sold for $35,000 in the 1990s, was catalogued with an estimated value of between $50,000 and $70,000.

By 1865 Walt Whitman was world-famous, and Leaves of Grass had been accepted by a publishing house in the US. Though still considered an iconoclast and a literary outsider, the poet's status began to grow at home. During his final years, Whitman became a respected literary vanguard visited by young artists. Several photographs and paintings of Whitman with a large beard cultivated a "Christ-figure" mystique. Whitman did not invent American transcendentalism, but he had become its most famous exponent and was also associated with American mysticism. In the twentieth century, young writers such as Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac rediscovered Whitman and reinterpreted his literary manifesto for a new audience.

Later life

Walt Whitman, circa 1860, by Mathew Brady

In 1864, Walt Whitman began writing to various people for assistance. Of James Redpath, a Boston publisher, he asked unsuccessfully for help in publishing his accounts of Washington during the War, called "Memoranda of a Year." Other people were enlisted in an attempt to find Whitman a better paying job. John Trowbridge met with Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, to find Whitman a position in that department. Chase, a politically sensitive man, not only turned down Whitman because he had learned he was the author of a notorious book, but kept a letter of recommendation written by Emerson as well. During February-March 1864 Whitman visited the wounded at the front, boosting morale and passing out books for them to read. Worn out by all this activity, Whitman moved to Georgetown, Colorado in July, physically and emotionally exhausted.

The events of late 1864 did little to raise Whitman's spirits. In October, he found out his brother George had been captured by the Confederacy after a battle; whether he was wounded and where he was held remained unknown. In December Whitman took his brother Jesse, whose mind had been deteriorating, to the Kings County Lunatic Asylum and committed him. Fortunately for Whitman, more positive events were taking place in Washington. In late December, O'Connor pleaded Whitman 's case before W.T. Otto, Assistant Secretary of the Interior, and in January, Whitman was offered a low-level clerkship for, to Whitman, the more than adequate salary of $1,200 a year. Upon returning to Washington in January 1865, Whitman was assigned to the Indian Bureau division of the Interior Department. George, after being released from the Danville, Virginia, prisoner-of-war camp, returned home in March, and Whitman took a leave of absence to visit him. When he returned to Washington, Whitman was promoted to a clerkship one grade higher.

Whitman had not by any means stopped writing poetry during this period. He had, soon after the 1860 Leaves of Grass went into a second printing, begun work on a new volume of poetry, to be called Banners at Day-Break, but the failure of Thayer and Eldridge brought this plan to a halt. The verses intended for the aborted volume would find their way into the next edition of Leaves of Grass (on which Whitman was continually working) and into his next book, which would poetically comment on the Civil War.

In January 1865 Whitman was appointed a clerk in the Indian Affairs Department in Washington. By spring, not long after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, he was fired from his government post on the orders of Secretary of the Interior James Harlan. The charge was that Whitman was the author of a "dirty book," Leaves of Grass. Actually, Whitman's dismissal was part of an efficiency campaign, but Harlan, formerly a professor of mental and moral science in Iowa, also objected strongly to Whitman's emphasis on the body in his poetry. On 1 July, Ashton reinstated Whitman and transferred him to his own department. Whitman was relieved and his life returned to normal. O'Connor, though, was still upset and went about vindicating Whitman by publishing a biographical study, The Good Gray Poet, in January 1866. This book defended both Whitman and artistic freedom and is especially interesting today because Whitman himself had a major role in preparing it.

Over the next few years Whitman continued to work on his poetry, and in 1871 a number of works were published. Roberts Brothers of Boston published After All, Not to Create Only (later called "Song of the Exposition"), a poem which celebrated the opening of the National Industrial Exposition in New York on 7 September 1871. Whitman had been invited by the organizing committee and was paid $100 for his work, which he read in person on opening day. In the same year appeared Democratic Vistas, Whitman's prose comments on the role of the poet in shaping both America's and humanity's destinies, and the importance of democracy as an element in the formation of character. Also in 1871 Whitman published Passage to India, which praised the completion of the Suez Canal, the laying of the Atlantic cable, and the finishing of the First Transcontinental Railroad.

Health decline

The Walt Whitman House in Camden, New Jersey.

Early in 1873, Whitman suffered a paralytic stroke; his mother died in May the same year. Both events were difficult for Whitman and left him depressed. He lived his final years at his home on Mickle Street in Camden, New Jersey, revising Leaves of Grass and receiving visitors, including Oscar Wilde.

After his stroke, his fame grew substantially both at home and abroad. Mostly it was stimulated by several prominent British writers criticizing the American academy for not recognizing Whitman's talents. These included William Rossetti and Anne Gilchrist. At this time in his life, Whitman also had a prominent group of national and international disciples, including Canadian writer and physician Richard Bucke.

During his later years, Whitman ventured out on only two significant journeys: to Colorado in 1879 and to Boston to visit Emerson in 1881. Preparing for death, Whitman commissioned a granite tomb shaped like a house for $4,000. In the last week of his life, he was too weak to lift a knife or fork and wrote: "I suffer all the time: I have no relief, no escape: it is monotony — monotony — monotony — in pain." He died on March 26, 1892. An autopsy revealed his lungs had diminished to one-eighth their normal breathing capacity, a result of bronchial pneumonia, and that an egg-sized abscess on his chest had eroded one of his ribs. The cause of death was officially listed as "pleurisy of the left side, consumption of the right lung, general military tuberculosis and parenchymatous nephritis." A public viewing of his body was held at his Camden home; over one thousand people visited in three hours. He was buried in his tomb at Harleigh Cemetery in Camden. Another public ceremony was held at the cemetery, with friends giving speeches, live music, and refreshments.

Lifestyle and beliefs

Poetic theory

Whitman wrote in the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, "The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it." He believed there was a vital, symbiotic relationship between the poet and society.

Popular pseudosciences

Like many during the 19th century, Whitman had a deep interest in phrenology. Though he originally criticized the pseudoscience as a "conglomeration of pretension and absurdity", he later called it harmless and worth studying. After his first phrenological analysis, on July 16, 1849, his analyst detected low skills in language but a high score in self-esteem and predicted Whitman would marry young.

Sexuality

Whitman's expression of sexuality ranged from his admiration for nineteenth-century ideals of male friendship to openly erotic descriptions of the male body, as can be readily seen in his poem "Song of Myself". This is in contradiction to the outrage Whitman displayed when confronted about these messages in public, praising chastity and denouncing masturbation. Toward the end of his life, he often told stories of previous girlfriends and sweethearts and denied an allegation from the New York Herald that he had "never had a love affair".

During the Civil War, the intense comradeship at the front lines in Virginia, which were visited by Whitman as he searched for his wounded brother, and later in Washington, D.C. where he spent a huge amount of time as an unpaid nurse, fueled his ideas about the convergence of homosexuality and democracy. In "Democratic Vistas", he begins to discriminate between amative (i.e., heterosexual) and adhesive (i.e., homosexual) love, and identifies the latter as the key to forming the community without which democracy is incomplete:

It is to the development, identification, and general prevalence of that fervid comradeship (the adhesive love, at least rivaling the amative love hitherto possessing imaginative literature, if not going beyond it), that I look for the counterbalance and offset of our materialistic and vulgar American democracy, and for the spiritualization thereof.

In 1915, Fernando Pessoa explicitly described Whitman as being homosexual in his sensationalist poem Saudação a Walt Whitman.

In the 1970s, the gay liberation movement made Whitman one of their poster children, citing the homosexual content and comparing him to Jean Genet for his love of young working-class men ("We Two Boys Together Clinging"). In particular the "Calamus" poems, written after a failed and very likely homosexual relationship, contain passages that were interpreted to represent the coming out of a gay man. The name of the poems alone would have sufficed to convey homosexual connotations to the ones in the know at the time, since the calamus plant is associated with Kalamos, a god in antique mythology who was transformed with grief by the death of his lover, the male youth Karpos. In addition, the calamus plant's central characteristic is a prominent central vein that is phallic in appearance.

Whitman's romantic and sexual attraction towards other men is not disputed. However, whether or not Whitman had sexual relationships with men has been the subject of some critical disagreement. The best evidence is a pair of third-hand accounts attributed to fellow poets George Sylvester Viereck and Edward Carpenter, neither of whom entrusted those accounts to print themselves. Though scholars in the field have increasingly supported the view of Whitman as actively homosexual, this aspect of his personality is still sometimes omitted when his works are presented in educational settings. The love of Whitman's life may well have been Peter Doyle, a bus conductor whom he met around 1866. They were inseparable for several years. Interviewed in 1895, Doyle said: "We were familiar at once — I put my hand on his knee — we understood. He did not get out at the end of the trip — in fact went all the way back with me.". A more explicit second-hand account comes from Oscar Wilde. Wilde met Whitman in America in 1882, and wrote to the homosexual rights activist George Cecil Ives that there was "no doubt" about the great American poet's sexual orientation — "I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips," he boasted.

Harold Bloom in The Western Canon proposes that although Whitman was primarily attracted to his own sex, his primary expressions of sexuality throughout his life were onanistic and reads numerous onanistic references into Leaves of Grass. He writes of Whitman as one of the first Western writers to speak in praise of masturbation. This view is supported by Robert S. Frederickson in his essay "Public Onanism: Whitman's Song of Himself". Bloom's thesis—that the sexual experience Whitman celebrates was possibly merely imagined—has been ridiculed by other scholars, such as Gary Schmidgall, who view it as obtuse at best, and homophobic at worst.

Slavery

Generally, Whitman's position on slavery was that it was an evil, but so long as the Constitution made it legal, he believed that fugitive slave laws should be obeyed. He stated his views on slavery in a quasi-political treatise called The Eighteenth Presidency written between 1854 and 1856; although it was put into proof sheets, it was never published in Whitman's lifetime. In his optimism for the power of American democracy, he hoped that the American people would voluntarily give up slavery rather than lose it through civil war.

Legacy and influence

Walt Whitman's influence on contemporary American poetry is so fundamental that it has been said that American poetry divides into two camps: that which naturally flows from Whitman and that which consciously strives to accept it. Modernist poet Ezra Pound called Whitman "America's poet... He is America."

During the height of modernism, Whitman continued to present "a problem" until he was rescued by such influential poets as William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane. Later, Allen Ginsberg and the beat poets would become the most vociferous champions of Whitman's expansive, abundant, humanistic America. Ginsberg begins his famous poem "Supermarket in California" from Howl and Other Poems with a reference to Whitman. The hand of Whitman can be seen working in such diverse twentieth-century poets as John Berryman, E.E. Cummings, Galway Kinnell, Langston Hughes, Philip Levine, Kenneth Koch, James Wright, Joy Harjo, William Carlos Williams, Mary Oliver, Bob Dylan, Jerry Wemple and June Jordan, to name only a few. Whitman was also revered by international poets ranging from Pablo Neruda to Rimbaud to Federico García Lorca to Fernando Pessoa.

Yale professor and literary critic Harold Bloom considers Walt Whitman to be one of the five most important American poets. The others in Bloom's pantheon are Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, and Robert Frost. Whitman also had a huge influence on the British novelist and poet D. H. Lawrence. Contemporary Spokane Indian poet, Sherman Alexie, has also been influenced by Whitman, mentioning him explicitly in his poem "Defending Walt Whitman".

Whitman also influenced Bram Stoker author of Dracula. Stoker modeled his character Dracula after Whitman, saying in his notes that Dracula represented the quintessential male, which to Stoker was Whitman, whom he corresponded with until Whitman's death. Stoker's description of Dracula closely resembled Whitman, and it is said that Whitman is the model for Stoker's Dracula.

Although Whitman left Long Island at age 22, he is still much revered there and especially in his native Huntington, where a large shopping mall, high school and major road are all named in his honor. The oldest newspaper on Long Island, The Long Islander, touts that it was "founded by Walt Whitman". Camden and the surrounding area also honor the poet. The Walt Whitman Bridge spans the Delaware River, linking Philadelphia and southern New Jersey, and the Walt Whitman Center at Rutgers-Camden hosts poets, plays and other events. Additionally, a statue of Whitman can be found in the campus center.

References

  1. Matthews, Brander, Introduction to American Literature (American Book Company, 1896), p. 224.
  2. Burroughs, John, "Biographical Introduction," Leaves of Grass, R.S. Peale the metrical structures of European poetry for an expansionist freestyle verse—"irregular" but "beautifully rhythmic"— which represented his philosophical view that America was destined to reinvent the world as emancipator and liberator of the human spirit. Matthews, Brander, supra, p. 225.
  3. By Blue Ontario's Shore - http://www.princeton.edu/~batke/logr/log_186.html
  4. Miller, James E., Jr. Walt Whitman. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc. 1962. p. 17.
  5. Loving, Jerome. Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself. University of California Press, 1999. ISBN 0520226879. p. 29
  6. ^ "Walt Whitman," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 3: Antebellum Writers in New York and the South. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Joel Myerson, University of South Carolina. The Gale Group, 1979, pp. 350-371
  7. Loving, Jerome. Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself. University of California Press, 1999. ISBN 0520226879. p. 32
  8. Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. ISBN 0679767096. p. 60
  9. Miller, James E., Jr. Walt Whitman. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc. 1962. p. 55.
  10. Miller, James E., Jr. Walt Whitman. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc. 1962. p. 155.
  11. Cigar Aficionado, November/December 2000
  12. Miller, James E., Jr. Walt Whitman. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc. 1962. p. 33.
  13. ^ Loving, Jerome. Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself. University of California Press, 1999. ISBN 0520226879. p. 479
  14. Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. ISBN 0679767096. p. 587
  15. Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. ISBN 0679767096. p. 588
  16. Loving, Jerome. Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself. University of California Press, 1999. ISBN 0520226879. p. 480
  17. Walt Whitman House, Visit South Jersey. Accessed August 16, 2007. "Not far from the poet's house is the historic Harleigh Cemetery, his final resting place."
  18. Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. ISBN 0679767096. p. 589
  19. Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. ISBN 0679767096. p. 5
  20. Loving, Jerome. Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself. University of California Press, 1999. ISBN 0520226879. p. 150
  21. ^ Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. ISBN 0679767096. p. 490
  22. Martin, Robert K. (2002). "Whitman, Walt". glbtq.com.
  23. http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/whitman.htm
  24. McKenna, Neil "The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde", Century 2003, p33
  25. Fredrickson, Robert S. "Public Onanism: Whitman's Song of Himself". Modern Language Quarterly 46 (June 1985), 143-160
  26. Schmidgall, Gary. Walt Whitman: A Gay Life. NY: Dutton, 1997
  27. Pound, Ezra. "Walt Whitman", Whitman, Roy Harvey Pearce, ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1962. p. 8
  28. Nuzum, Eric. The Dead Travel Fast 141-147.

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